The Rule of Taste and the Cult of Beauty The tendency for ceremony to dominate affairs of government was but one aspect of a broader feature of Heian aristocratic society. According to historian George Sansom: "The most striking feature of the aristocratic society of the Heian capital was its aesthetic quality. It is true that it was a society composed of a small number of especially favoured people, but it is none the less remarkable that, even in its emptiest follies, it was moved by considerations of refinement and governed by a rule of taste."4 Sansom hit the nail on the head with the important phrase "rule of taste," which we should contrast with the rule of law (civil or moral) that prevails in many societies. In Heian Japan, subtle rules of aesthetic refinement were the major regulators of aristocratic behavior. Negotiating these rules with skill was the primary challenge for an aristocrat desirous of the coveted goal of a good reputation.
What constituted good taste? That which was beautiful constituted good taste. Heian aristocrats made a cult out of beauty. Of course, what a Heian aristocrat might consider beautiful, someone in different cultural circumstances might consider ugly. In terms of personal appearance, for example, Heian aristocrats regarded white teeth as ugly, particularly for women. "They look just like peeled caterpillars" wrote one critic of a woman who refused to blacken her teeth. To blacken their teeth Heian women applied a sticky black dye to their teeth so that their mouths resembled a dark, toothless oval when open. This particular custom of blackening the teeth (o-haguroお歯黒) persisted until the 1870s among certain elite groups of Japanese women.
There were many other aspects of a beautiful personal appearance. Both men and women prized a rounded, plump figure. The face in particular would ideally have been round and puffy. Small eyes were ideal for both sexes, as was powdery white skin. Aristocrats with dark complexions, both men and women, frequently had to apply makeup to appear more pale. Even most capital military officers, many of whom were civilian aristocrats with no military training at all, would not have dared appear in public on formal occasions without makeup.
The majority of Japanese at the time must have appeared quite the opposite of the aristocrats. Peasants and laborers engaged in demanding physical work out of doors. Food was often scarce. These conditions tended to produce lean physiques and dark skin. It seems that in nearly all human societies, beauty and wealth go hand-in-hand. In the Heian period, the plump, pale courtier was obviously someone of privilege, wealth, and leisure. Such a person had the time and resources to attend to her or his appearance.
In today's society, both in this country and Japan, conditions of life for the average person tend to produce exactly what was beautiful in the Heian period: a plump, pale appearance. Society, therefore, no longer regards such an appearance as beautiful or glamorous. A lean, dark appearance is now a signal of sufficient wealth and leisure time to join and use exercise facilities, spend time at the beach or in tanning booths, and so forth. Standards of personal beauty are largely arbitrary, in that there does not seem to be any single ideal set of criteria that has held stable across time, culture and historical circumstance. But this rule is widely applicable: it is and has been the case that societies regard as personally beautiful an appearance requiring wealth, effort, and therefore leisure time to attain.
There were still other standards of personal beauty in Heian times. For women, nature unfortunately put eyebrows in the wrong place. To correct this problem, women plucked out their eyebrows and painted them back on, usually quite thick, an inch or so above their original location, thereby beautifying the face. Also, *extremely long hair*--longer than one's own body--was de rigueur for an attractive Heian woman. Washing such hair was an all-day affair requiring the assistance of numerous attendants. Again, notice the connection with wealth and leisure. (Ideal female beauty: *example 1**example 2**example 3*; #transposed to contemporary anime#) Standards of male beauty were, in many ways, quite similar to those for female beauty. Although men did not shave their eyebrows, idealized depictions of handsome men show the eyebrows high on the forehead. Men would ideally have a thin mustache and/or a thin tuft of beard at the chin. Large quantities of facial hair, however, detracted substantially from one's attractiveness. Looking at art of the Heian period, or even art of later periods depicting scenes of Heian courtly life, it is sometimes difficult to tell men from women from the face alone. The merging of male and female features is particularly apparent in depictions of children and people in their teenage years.
Heian aristocrats regarded the nude body as disgustingly ugly. People of taste always adorned themselves with multiple layers of clothing. This clothing was inseparable from the body itself. It provided all manner of possibilities both to enhance the taste and beauty of one's appearance and to detract from it. First, clothing had to conform to a person's rank. Other key considerations included social situations (inside one's house, visiting a temple, participating in a court ceremony, etc.), prevailing weather, and the current season. Women commonly wore *five or six layers of robes,* the most crucial part of was the sleeves. Each sleeve would be of a slightly different length and color, resulting in multicolored bands of fabric at the ends of the arms. The arrangement of these colors was terribly important for conveying a sense of refinement and good taste. Just one color being a little too pale or a little to bright could easily become a point of criticism. Appearing in colors that blatantly clashed or were inappropriate for the season could ruin a person's reputation.
There was much more to the rule of taste and the cult of beauty than one's physical appearance. All aspects of behavior were opportunities for the display of taste or the lack thereof. Walking, talking, eating, playing music--and, of course, all aristocrats *played music*--and more were all opportunities for artistic display. Most important of all was a person's handwriting. Careers were made and lost over the quality of one's writing. Love affairs began and ended similarly. As Morris points out regarding the importance of handwriting, "A fine hand was probably the most important single mark of a 'good' person, and it came close to being regarded as a moral virtue."5 (If you have a fast internet connection, you might want to #listen to some Heian aristocratic music.#) Let us take two examples of the importance of handwriting from the literature of the time. The first is from Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi) Sei Shōnagon (#image#) was a lady-in-waiting of a former empress (principal wife of an emperor now retired) and was herself of aristocratic rank. Her Pillow Book, thus named because she kept it under her pillow, is a diary-like account of thoughts and events in her life. The following excerpt refers to Fujiwara no Nobutsune, an official in the Ministry of Ceremony:
One day when Nobutsune was serving as Intendant in the Office of Palace Works he sent a sketch to one of the craftsmen explaining how a certain piece of work should be done. 'Kindly execute it in this fashion,' he added in Chinese characters. I happened to notice the piece of paper and it was the most preposterous writing I had ever seen. Next to his message I wrote, 'If you do the work in this style, you will certainly produce something odd.' The document found its way to the Imperial apartments and everyone who saw it was greatly amused. Nobutsune was furious and after this held a grudge against me.6
In a scene from the lengthy novel, Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) there is a scene in which Prince Genji, the protagonist, and Lady Murasaki, Genji's lover, are lying together in her room. Murasaki is worried because a thirteen-year-old princess, Nyosan, has recently become Genji's official wife. While Genji and Murasaki are together, a letter from the young princess arrives. Murasaki is particularly anxious to see the handwriting, for this will determine the fate of all concerned. When reading the letter, Genji allows Murasaki to *catch a glimpse* of it:
Murasaki's first glance told her that it was indeed a childish production. She wondered how anyone could have reached such an age without developing a more polished style. But she pretended not to have noticed and made no comment. Genji also kept silent. If the letter had come from anyone else, he would certainly have whispered something about the writing, but he felt sorry for the girl and simply said [to Murasaki], 'Well now, you see that you have nothing to worry about.'7
Wife or not, the "Shining Prince," as Genji was known, would have nothing romantically to do with someone whose handwriting was not up to par (years later, when, presumably, her handwriting had improved, Genji changed his mind). Among the Heian aristocracy, handwriting was a direct extension of a person's character, spirit and personality. Heian aristocrats spent little time and energy writing scholarly essays and the like. The majority of what they wrote was poetry, and sometimes poems even substituted for memoranda in government offices. Nearly any event or occasion, public or private, called for rounds of poetry. A person deficient in poetic skills would have been at a serious disadvantage in Heian society. In their poems, the aristocrats delighted in obscure references and plays on words. Poetry was the ideal medium for communicating in a delicate, refined and indirect way. Taking a specific example, one night Murasaki Shikibu (#image#), author of the Tale of Genji, was awakened by a man tapping on the shutter of her bedroom--a sure sign of someone wanting to gain admittance. Suspecting who it might be, and wanting to have nothing to do with him, she lay still and did not respond. The next morning, she received the following poem (brought by messenger, as was typical) from the powerful and lecherous Fujiwara Michinaga, the man who had been tapping on the shutter the night before:
How sad for him who stands the whole night long
Knocking on your cedar door
Tap-tap-tap like the cry of the kuina bird.
The reply to such a poem should ideally follow up on the image presented in the initial verse, the kuina bird (a small water-rail) in this case. Murasaki answered:
Sadder for her who had answered the kuina's tap,
For it was no innocent bird who stood there knocking on the door.8
One can imagine that such an exchange might be carried out in a much less refined fashion in a different time or place. With such a stress on writing and poetry, one might think that scholarship was an important part of the life of Heian aristocrats, as it would have been for their Tang and Song Chinese counterparts. In fact, however, this was not the case. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, Japanese aristocrats generally had little interest in moral philosophy or the systematic study of any body of theoretical knowledge. There was a central university, where Chinese classics formed the main curriculum. In the early Heian period, it was a significant institution, but by the end of the tenth century, increasingly fewer aristocrats studied there. There is evidence that elite aristocrats of the mid Heian period regarded its professors as laughably odd and out of place. In a passage from the Tale of Genji, for example, a number of young aristocrats cannot contain their laughter upon seeing a group of professors, clad in "ill-fitting robes," perform an induction ceremony at the university. Poetry, painting, music, calligraphy and the like comprised the educational training of most aristocrats, which private tutors usually directed. Men also had to learn classical Chinese composition, through which process they also gained a modest familiarity with the major works of Chinese literature such as the Confucian Analects. Some women also learned classical Chinese but they were under no social pressure to do so. Aristocratic education included some subjects that today we might find hard to imagine. Although in later ages, frequent bathing became part of Japanese culture at all levels, Heian nobles took baths only rarely. In such a context, perfume was an especially valuable commodity, liberally applied to mask odor. Perfume mixing, therefore, was an important aristocratic skill for men and women alike. Perfume making contests were common, and, in the Tale of Genji, Prince Genji was a skilled perfume mixer. Some common ingredients in perfumes of the time included aloes, cinnamon, ground conch shell, Indian resin, musk, sweet pine, tropical tulip, cloves, and white gum.9 Despite its possible charms when studied from afar, Heian-period society contained plenty of anxiety-producing elements. These elements and the relatively primitive level of technological conveniences of the time would likely make daily existence excruciating for modern people seeking to recreate the conditions of Heian life (I know of no serious attempts at this time, but historical re-enactment seems to be becoming popular in various parts of the world). For a very interesting and readable perspective on Heian-period social life, read the following short article, *Why is there no talk of food or bathing in the Tale of Genji?*
The tendency for ceremony to dominate affairs of government was but one aspect of a broader feature of Heian aristocratic society. According to historian George Sansom: "The most striking feature of the aristocratic society of the Heian capital was its aesthetic quality. It is true that it was a society composed of a small number of especially favoured people, but it is none the less remarkable that, even in its emptiest follies, it was moved by considerations of refinement and governed by a rule of taste."4 Sansom hit the nail on the head with the important phrase "rule of taste," which we should contrast with the rule of law (civil or moral) that prevails in many societies. In Heian Japan, subtle rules of aesthetic refinement were the major regulators of aristocratic behavior. Negotiating these rules with skill was the primary challenge for an aristocrat desirous of the coveted goal of a good reputation.
What constituted good taste? That which was beautiful constituted good taste. Heian aristocrats made a cult out of beauty. Of course, what a Heian aristocrat might consider beautiful, someone in different cultural circumstances might consider ugly. In terms of personal appearance, for example, Heian aristocrats regarded white teeth as ugly, particularly for women. "They look just like peeled caterpillars" wrote one critic of a woman who refused to blacken her teeth. To blacken their teeth Heian women applied a sticky black dye to their teeth so that their mouths resembled a dark, toothless oval when open. This particular custom of blackening the teeth (o-haguro お歯黒) persisted until the 1870s among certain elite groups of Japanese women.
There were many other aspects of a beautiful personal appearance. Both men and women prized a rounded, plump figure. The face in particular would ideally have been round and puffy. Small eyes were ideal for both sexes, as was powdery white skin. Aristocrats with dark complexions, both men and women, frequently had to apply makeup to appear more pale. Even most capital military officers, many of whom were civilian aristocrats with no military training at all, would not have dared appear in public on formal occasions without makeup.
The majority of Japanese at the time must have appeared quite the opposite of the aristocrats. Peasants and laborers engaged in demanding physical work out of doors. Food was often scarce. These conditions tended to produce lean physiques and dark skin. It seems that in nearly all human societies, beauty and wealth go hand-in-hand. In the Heian period, the plump, pale courtier was obviously someone of privilege, wealth, and leisure. Such a person had the time and resources to attend to her or his appearance.
In today's society, both in this country and Japan, conditions of life for the average person tend to produce exactly what was beautiful in the Heian period: a plump, pale appearance. Society, therefore, no longer regards such an appearance as beautiful or glamorous. A lean, dark appearance is now a signal of sufficient wealth and leisure time to join and use exercise facilities, spend time at the beach or in tanning booths, and so forth. Standards of personal beauty are largely arbitrary, in that there does not seem to be any single ideal set of criteria that has held stable across time, culture and historical circumstance. But this rule is widely applicable: it is and has been the case that societies regard as personally beautiful an appearance requiring wealth, effort, and therefore leisure time to attain.
There were still other standards of personal beauty in Heian times. For women, nature unfortunately put eyebrows in the wrong place. To correct this problem, women plucked out their eyebrows and painted them back on, usually quite thick, an inch or so above their original location, thereby beautifying the face. Also, *extremely long hair*--longer than one's own body--was de rigueur for an attractive Heian woman. Washing such hair was an all-day affair requiring the assistance of numerous attendants. Again, notice the connection with wealth and leisure. (Ideal female beauty: *example 1* *example 2* *example 3*; #transposed to contemporary anime#)
Standards of male beauty were, in many ways, quite similar to those for female beauty. Although men did not shave their eyebrows, idealized depictions of handsome men show the eyebrows high on the forehead. Men would ideally have a thin mustache and/or a thin tuft of beard at the chin. Large quantities of facial hair, however, detracted substantially from one's attractiveness. Looking at art of the Heian period, or even art of later periods depicting scenes of Heian courtly life, it is sometimes difficult to tell men from women from the face alone. The merging of male and female features is particularly apparent in depictions of children and people in their teenage years.
Heian aristocrats regarded the nude body as disgustingly ugly. People of taste always adorned themselves with multiple layers of clothing. This clothing was inseparable from the body itself. It provided all manner of possibilities both to enhance the taste and beauty of one's appearance and to detract from it. First, clothing had to conform to a person's rank. Other key considerations included social situations (inside one's house, visiting a temple, participating in a court ceremony, etc.), prevailing weather, and the current season. Women commonly wore *five or six layers of robes,* the most crucial part of was the sleeves. Each sleeve would be of a slightly different length and color, resulting in multicolored bands of fabric at the ends of the arms. The arrangement of these colors was terribly important for conveying a sense of refinement and good taste. Just one color being a little too pale or a little to bright could easily become a point of criticism. Appearing in colors that blatantly clashed or were inappropriate for the season could ruin a person's reputation.
There was much more to the rule of taste and the cult of beauty than one's physical appearance. All aspects of behavior were opportunities for the display of taste or the lack thereof. Walking, talking, eating, playing music--and, of course, all aristocrats *played music*--and more were all opportunities for artistic display. Most important of all was a person's handwriting. Careers were made and lost over the quality of one's writing. Love affairs began and ended similarly. As Morris points out regarding the importance of handwriting, "A fine hand was probably the most important single mark of a 'good' person, and it came close to being regarded as a moral virtue."5 (If you have a fast internet connection, you might want to #listen to some Heian aristocratic music.#)
Let us take two examples of the importance of handwriting from the literature of the time. The first is from Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi) Sei Shōnagon (#image#) was a lady-in-waiting of a former empress (principal wife of an emperor now retired) and was herself of aristocratic rank. Her Pillow Book, thus named because she kept it under her pillow, is a diary-like account of thoughts and events in her life. The following excerpt refers to Fujiwara no Nobutsune, an official in the Ministry of Ceremony:
- One day when Nobutsune was serving as Intendant in the Office of Palace Works he sent a sketch to one of the craftsmen explaining how a certain piece of work should be done. 'Kindly execute it in this fashion,' he added in Chinese characters. I happened to notice the piece of paper and it was the most preposterous writing I had ever seen. Next to his message I wrote, 'If you do the work in this style, you will certainly produce something odd.' The document found its way to the Imperial apartments and everyone who saw it was greatly amused. Nobutsune was furious and after this held a grudge against me.6
In a scene from the lengthy novel, Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) there is a scene in which Prince Genji, the protagonist, and Lady Murasaki, Genji's lover, are lying together in her room. Murasaki is worried because a thirteen-year-old princess, Nyosan, has recently become Genji's official wife. While Genji and Murasaki are together, a letter from the young princess arrives. Murasaki is particularly anxious to see the handwriting, for this will determine the fate of all concerned. When reading the letter, Genji allows Murasaki to *catch a glimpse* of it:- Murasaki's first glance told her that it was indeed a childish production. She wondered how anyone could have reached such an age without developing a more polished style. But she pretended not to have noticed and made no comment. Genji also kept silent. If the letter had come from anyone else, he would certainly have whispered something about the writing, but he felt sorry for the girl and simply said [to Murasaki], 'Well now, you see that you have nothing to worry about.'7
Wife or not, the "Shining Prince," as Genji was known, would have nothing romantically to do with someone whose handwriting was not up to par (years later, when, presumably, her handwriting had improved, Genji changed his mind). Among the Heian aristocracy, handwriting was a direct extension of a person's character, spirit and personality.Heian aristocrats spent little time and energy writing scholarly essays and the like. The majority of what they wrote was poetry, and sometimes poems even substituted for memoranda in government offices. Nearly any event or occasion, public or private, called for rounds of poetry. A person deficient in poetic skills would have been at a serious disadvantage in Heian society. In their poems, the aristocrats delighted in obscure references and plays on words. Poetry was the ideal medium for communicating in a delicate, refined and indirect way. Taking a specific example, one night Murasaki Shikibu (#image#), author of the Tale of Genji, was awakened by a man tapping on the shutter of her bedroom--a sure sign of someone wanting to gain admittance. Suspecting who it might be, and wanting to have nothing to do with him, she lay still and did not respond. The next morning, she received the following poem (brought by messenger, as was typical) from the powerful and lecherous Fujiwara Michinaga, the man who had been tapping on the shutter the night before:
- How sad for him who stands the whole night long
- Knocking on your cedar door
- Tap-tap-tap like the cry of the kuina bird.
The reply to such a poem should ideally follow up on the image presented in the initial verse, the kuina bird (a small water-rail) in this case. Murasaki answered:- Sadder for her who had answered the kuina's tap,
- For it was no innocent bird who stood there knocking on the door.8
One can imagine that such an exchange might be carried out in a much less refined fashion in a different time or place.With such a stress on writing and poetry, one might think that scholarship was an important part of the life of Heian aristocrats, as it would have been for their Tang and Song Chinese counterparts. In fact, however, this was not the case. Unlike their Chinese counterparts, Japanese aristocrats generally had little interest in moral philosophy or the systematic study of any body of theoretical knowledge. There was a central university, where Chinese classics formed the main curriculum. In the early Heian period, it was a significant institution, but by the end of the tenth century, increasingly fewer aristocrats studied there. There is evidence that elite aristocrats of the mid Heian period regarded its professors as laughably odd and out of place. In a passage from the Tale of Genji, for example, a number of young aristocrats cannot contain their laughter upon seeing a group of professors, clad in "ill-fitting robes," perform an induction ceremony at the university. Poetry, painting, music, calligraphy and the like comprised the educational training of most aristocrats, which private tutors usually directed. Men also had to learn classical Chinese composition, through which process they also gained a modest familiarity with the major works of Chinese literature such as the Confucian Analects. Some women also learned classical Chinese but they were under no social pressure to do so.
Aristocratic education included some subjects that today we might find hard to imagine. Although in later ages, frequent bathing became part of Japanese culture at all levels, Heian nobles took baths only rarely. In such a context, perfume was an especially valuable commodity, liberally applied to mask odor. Perfume mixing, therefore, was an important aristocratic skill for men and women alike. Perfume making contests were common, and, in the Tale of Genji, Prince Genji was a skilled perfume mixer. Some common ingredients in perfumes of the time included aloes, cinnamon, ground conch shell, Indian resin, musk, sweet pine, tropical tulip, cloves, and white gum.9
Despite its possible charms when studied from afar, Heian-period society contained plenty of anxiety-producing elements. These elements and the relatively primitive level of technological conveniences of the time would likely make daily existence excruciating for modern people seeking to recreate the conditions of Heian life (I know of no serious attempts at this time, but historical re-enactment seems to be becoming popular in various parts of the world). For a very interesting and readable perspective on Heian-period social life, read the following short article, *Why is there no talk of food or bathing in the Tale of Genji?*